this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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I agree with all of this and it's nice to see some folks starting to accept that these cost more to make than movies and provide hundreds of hours more content than films, and perhaps its time to start adjusting pricing to match that. Especially with companies like Larian who are doing the right things with things like using Intimacy Coordinators, the lack of which in most of the industry was part of why voice actors went on strike. Larian was just using something Hollywood has used for decades, because there is a modicum of respect for the actors, but they didn't get to sell their game at a higher price despite doing more to treat their employees well.
Do you think so? I kind of figured the ten years was them trying to get the "narrative legos" thing right.
Narrative Legos was a concept to solve that problem. A game like Civilization is built to be systemic, and people can play that base game and be satisfied, and then you've got an affordable avenue to add content into the middle of the game and sell people new features that add a lot of content without taking a lot of work, like story-driven DLC typically takes for a game like Mass Effect or BioShock. So, that is a means to reduce costs, long-term, if they nail it. A systemic, story-driven game is one that can afford to be shorter while still demanding $60-$70, since you're meant to replay it. Then again, it sounds like they steered that game into just being a roguelite eventually, so maybe not every part of the concept worked.
Honestly, if you don't care about all the nice graphics and music and such, Unciv -- a reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android -- does demonstrate that the game doesn't really need all those assets to be perfectly playable.
That being said, I do enjoy the music and the graphics (though the responsiveness of Unciv is nice).
I always read Narrative Legos as Levine's frustration with the limitations of storytelling in games like System Shock 2/Bioshock (his babies). It seemed like he wanted a way for stories to be able to grow naturally based on choices made (somewhat like BG3, but more organic in nature, happening without having to necessarily be coded as such). Although that's probably because I'm more interested in the writing games side than programming games side, so my thoughts went to what it meant for writing.
However, I can see what you mean about how that can also impact the cost of development because now you can add more narrative to the game without it having to be such a separate, stand-alone piece (like DLC and Expansion Packs of yesteryear). So, interesting perspective, thank you for sharing it.
He's called out Civilization and DLC specifically as the inspiration for this experiment, but perhaps I missed another article where it was also intended to solve some limitation. One thing I'm sure of though is that Levine's criticism of his own work always finds its way into the story of his next game, haha.
Movies are way too expensive and make a bad example to say games should be more expensive. Inflation made people have less expandable money for luxury products but games don't get cheaper for some reason. Movies have become so expensive that people go less and less to the cinema, even in areas where everything is clean, perfect audio and nice seats. Streaming might be cheaper but most can't use an expensive bass sound system at home, so that's not it.
Games have become to ambitious and that's the publishers fault all alone. Now they try to convince everyone to pay more for games instead of stopping their miss management and you walk right into this trap.